You consider obtaining the data content and algorithms by physically dismantling the chip, but I think the whole point of PUFs is that the physical structure of the chip is part of its data content, and thus would also have to be recorded in a reproducible fashion in order to clone.
There was a talk on this at last year's Elliptic Curve Crypto workshop by Pim Tuyls of Philips, but the slides aren't available online (the problem of working in industry instead of academia I guess- everyone elses are available). Doesn't take long to google up papers on the theoretical basis, but I can't rememeber how far along they were at the hardware level unfortunately.
What he's offering (it seems) is the infrastructure, the projects themselves should come from others. I'm a mathematician myself and often have calculations that are large enough to be impractical on a single machine, but not epic enough in scale to attempt setting up my own scheme like distributed.net or folding@home, if I even knew how. Fortunately I already have access to a cluster that I can throw such jobs at, but based on a conference I was at just last week, there are plenty of researchers who don't.
Although whilst there I also learnt of BOINC (and plans to use it for a crypto challenge), so we'll have to see if Nightlife offers any advantages - largely depends on how many machines it makes available, of course!
Except there are probably plenty of scientists out there with far less ambitious projects which would none-the-less benefit from a few days worth of spare cycles provided accessing them was less hassle than just running the project locally. I've just started a number theory phd, and sometimes find myself staring at processes that'll take three days to finish on my machine. Not worth setting up a global distributed computing project for, but if there's one just sitting around that I can easily offload it to, run something else requiring more interaction and still have my answer in three hours instead, then that'd speed things up considerably for me.
Apologies if some of the projects you mention do just that (and the only novelty here is the use of Macs), as I haven't looked at distributed computing efforts in years and am assuming they're all assigned to long-range goals (factoring, protein folding, SETI etc) rather than being generally open to researchers.
About a year ago the LA Times had an article on cyc which i think was reported here on slashdot, and in fact it addresses that very issue:
"But confident as he is that Cyc is about to emerge as a truly intelligent machine, Lenat is thinking hard about the responsibilities programmers have to ensure the software works exclusively to humans' advantage.
"HAL killed the ['2001'] crew because it had been told not to lie to them, but also to lie to them about the mission," he observes. "No one ever told HAL that killing is worse than lying. But we've told Cyc.""
You can get the google cache of the original article here , or the PDF version from the Cyc Website .
Slashdot Mirror
You consider obtaining the data content and algorithms by physically dismantling the chip, but I think the whole point of PUFs is that the physical structure of the chip is part of its data content, and thus would also have to be recorded in a reproducible fashion in order to clone.
There was a talk on this at last year's Elliptic Curve Crypto workshop by Pim Tuyls of Philips, but the slides aren't available online (the problem of working in industry instead of academia I guess- everyone elses are available). Doesn't take long to google up papers on the theoretical basis, but I can't rememeber how far along they were at the hardware level unfortunately.
What he's offering (it seems) is the infrastructure, the projects themselves should come from others. I'm a mathematician myself and often have calculations that are large enough to be impractical on a single machine, but not epic enough in scale to attempt setting up my own scheme like distributed.net or folding@home, if I even knew how. Fortunately I already have access to a cluster that I can throw such jobs at, but based on a conference I was at just last week, there are plenty of researchers who don't.
Although whilst there I also learnt of BOINC (and plans to use it for a crypto challenge), so we'll have to see if Nightlife offers any advantages - largely depends on how many machines it makes available, of course!
Frogger? How about something a bit more dramatic - Dance Dance Immolation!
Except there are probably plenty of scientists out there with far less ambitious projects which would none-the-less benefit from a few days worth of spare cycles provided accessing them was less hassle than just running the project locally. I've just started a number theory phd, and sometimes find myself staring at processes that'll take three days to finish on my machine. Not worth setting up a global distributed computing project for, but if there's one just sitting around that I can easily offload it to, run something else requiring more interaction and still have my answer in three hours instead, then that'd speed things up considerably for me.
Apologies if some of the projects you mention do just that (and the only novelty here is the use of Macs), as I haven't looked at distributed computing efforts in years and am assuming they're all assigned to long-range goals (factoring, protein folding, SETI etc) rather than being generally open to researchers.
You can get the google cache of the original article here , or the PDF version from the Cyc Website .